- Prologue

by Quincy Morris, Vampire (BAEN) (v5. 0)

  "I gather you found your lost inspiration, Mr. Morris?"

  "How—" I croaked, so mad I had to break off to work enough spit into my mouth to talk. "How dare you?"

  He gave a small shrug. "As we stood together up there I had a childhood memory of how I was first taught to swim. My loving father picked me up and threw me into the water. It was… effective."

  "It's—" Again I broke off.

  He gave me an earnest, inquiring look. "Yes?"

  "Nothing," I snarled and got busy picking myself up, not without difficulty for I kept sinking into the snowdrift. "It worked."

  "Do you think you can repeat what you just did?"

  "I reckon I'd better. There's too damn many cliffs around here."

  "Ha!" he said, his eyes flashing briefly with much amusement.

  Cursing under my breath, I struggled free of the drift, dusting snow from my backside and sleeves. "When it happened did I look like you do? All black specks?"

  He thought it over. "More like a dark gray cloud. But understand that others would not be able to see you, only those of our kind. Animals will sense you as well, so—"

  "I know, be careful not to get caught."

  He grunted a short affirmation. "Do you require any more instruction tonight?"

  "I think I've had more than enough. I'll get the hang of the rest on my own, if you don't mind."

  "Then I will bid you good evening and good practice." So saying, he made another change in himself. I recognized the roiling darkness that spun within the outline of his body, only this time it was reversed. He seemed to shrink, his upright posture swiftly wilting, the bones of his face stretching even as those of his limbs shortened. He dropped forward, but not from injury. Four sturdy legs supported his wolf-form now. The only wonder of it was the fact that his action was now no more alarming to me than if he'd picked up a hat and cane to venture forth for a stroll.

  His huge green eyes caught the moonlight and flashed again; then with little sound his shaggy black figure trotted briskly off between the trees. He was probably going to have a little hunt around for his missing children.

  I slapped myself down to make sure everything was still there and intact and with some success managed to shrug off the remains of my anger. He'd surprised and scared the hell out of me, but I could see the purpose behind it. His memory about learning to swim had capped things.

  Damnation, but if that wasn't exactly how my pa had taught me.

  * * *

  With such an alarming start to grease the wheels, I worked to avoid any threat of his repetition of the harrowing lesson. He'd been right; belief accounted for most of the effort required. Before the night was out I captured the skill of vanishing and happily experimented for hours until the cold finally drove me back to the shelter of the castle. I made my entry by means of the gap between the door and the stone threshold, re-forming inside by slow degrees so I could watch my hands gradually regain solidity. I'd once seen photographs with double images, the second image being fainter and more ghost-like; so now did I seem to imitate them. This was completely amusing to me, though exhausting. By the time I climbed up to my room to sleep for the day I felt like a wrung rag and instinctively knew I'd feed more heavily when next I woke.

  I lighted candles for comfort, settled into my earth-layered bed, and tried to fill the remaining time before dawn by means of a book. It was one of the many works in English Dracula had in his vast collection, but failed to hold my interest for more than a line or two. His pushing me off the tower had set up a train of dark thought that needed pursuing.

  You see, I'd not yet forgotten about that problem of whether or not to kill him.

  Truly kill him.

  Inarguably, this was bald-faced ingratitude on my part. He'd helped me—in his own way—was continuing to help me, and I owed him quite a lot for that. But on the other hand, even if it was with the unwitting aid of Jack Seward and Van Helsing, Dracula had still contributed to poor Lucy's death. There was no getting around it.

  I'd deeply loved the girl, still loved her, though she'd chosen another over me. That sort of loss I could understand and accept, but to have her taken by a lingering and unnecessary passing was the height of unfairness. She'd been cheated from the joys of an ordinary life, and if Dracula was truthful about being Nosferatu, she'd lost even that kind of existence as well. And there I'd been right in her tomb at her second death, in my ignorance helping them to kill her again.

  If Dracula had only left her alone or if Jack had never called in the professor or if I'd known then what I knew now…

  It was a path straight to madness to think such things, but I had to get through it all. Sometimes I'd tramp my way along every inch of it, pausing now and then to crash a fist against the nearby wall whenever my feelings got the better of my self-control.

  Because I could still hear her screams.

  Throughout all these active nights I'd been mulling this over, which is a very long while for me. In the kind of rough and ready life I'd been born to in Texas you learn to think fast or else find yourself tipping your hat to old Saint Peter at the gate. Out of sheer stubbornness I'd taken my time with that forced fasting, but for just about any other troublesome situation or individual I had a talent for coming up with a quick plan to deal with the difficulty. Then would I swiftly carry it through without hesitation—but not for this one. The situation was complex, and I would not approach the obvious solution lightly.

  Along with Lucy, foremost in my considerings was Mina Harker. I was still in a worry about her, being mighty fond and respectful of the lady. She'd once called me her true friend, and that had struck deep and stayed in my heart. She had been most kind to me when I poured out my grief about Lucy to her, not something I could ever forget. I didn't want to let her down if I could help it; honor alone forbade betrayal of that trust.

  The subject of Mrs. Harker might be closed to my host but was wide open for me. Like it or not, I'd sworn to her face and before all the others that I'd see to Dracula's death, and her husband took my hand on it. Where I was raised a handshake's as sacred as any vow made in a church on a stack of Bibles. Though time had passed and my circumstances had changed, I still felt an obligation to fulfill my promise.

  Van Helsing had been pretty clear that once Dracula was dead, Mrs. Harker would then be safe from becoming a vampire herself. At the time it made a lot of sense. But I wasn't so sure now after hearing what Dracula had to say about her being given a "choice" when she died. Though impossible to prove or disprove, it sounded reasonable. I'd learned that the professor had been sorely wrong about a lot of things concerning vampires, might he also be wrong on this?

  The professor's version of vampires was dressed up with a lot of lore and what I would call superstition, and he and Jack Seward, both hardheaded scientists, seemed to have missed the main point of it all. If you looked at Mrs. Harker's blood-exchange with Dracula as being less like magic and more like passing on an illness, then the rules were different. Say a person with some fatal sickness infects you, then dies himself, does that mean you're safe from dying as well? Hardly. It struck me that whether he were destroyed or not, Dracula's blood was still in Mrs. Harker, his death would change nothing for her.

  That rankled. We'd all done our best, and I'd willingly traded my life thinking to spare her soul from hell. In those moments when I drew my last living breath I'd wholly believed we'd saved her and had been profoundly thankful. All for naught, it seemed.

  During one of our many talks in the library I'd raised the subject with Dracula about the terrible mark on her forehead, the burn she'd gotten when Van Helsing touched her with the Host. Its miraculous healing had been proof of our success, and thus had I slipped peacefully into the sleep of death. (Or so it seemed.)

  Because of his link with Mrs. Harker Dracula had been aware of some awful injury befalling her, but knew nothing specific and pressed me for details. These I provided, completing my description of the incident with an obvious que
stion.

  "Was she indeed being shunned by God for her association with you?" I asked. "And if so, how could she be cured if you were not destroyed after all?"

  He'd been silent for a very long time and finally shook his head. "How can I of all those who walk the earth answer you? Who am I to explain His works?" He twitched his fingers toward the ceiling. "Miracles are not so common as they once were, but they must still happen or faith would fade. She thought me dead, and perhaps it was enough for her healing. Beyond that I cannot say."

  "But—"

  "In truth, Mr. Morris, I cannot speak of such things. Long before your thrice-great-grandsire was born I gave part of myself to the Void. It is best you not know more of it, only understand that I am not one to consult on matters of faith."

  For all that, I still wondered why it could be that he and his kind were able to sleep in hallowed ground yet must shun the cross, but I'd stirred him up enough with my questions and allowed that he would not welcome more for the time being. Perhaps he had no answer for that anyway.

  The whole business was pretty complicated, and I wanted to be as impartial as possible, which is why I spent so much time sizing up the man to see how he compared with the monster I and the others had hunted.

  Van Helsing had it nailed tight that Dracula was dangerous and resourceful as they come, but he'd missed on something he called the vampire's "child brain." I didn't quite catch the professor's meaning on that point at the time, for his accent and use of English took getting used to; I eventually worked out that he'd frozen himself on the idea that Dracula was missing a few bricks in his building when it came to new situations and worldly experience, giving us an advantage. He'd assumed that Dracula was all instinct, like an animal, and that his memory was flawed from lying around in his tomb for centuries on end. But I now saw this was pure lack of knowledge and perhaps wishfulness on the Dutchman's part, and we'd all foolishly fallen in with it.

  The actuality was that Dracula was wily as anyone I'd ever met—which is saying a lot—and what I would call a long thinker. After all, he'd put years of preparation into his coming to England and would hardly let himself be thwarted by our little party. There was nothing amiss with his thinking or memory, and had he been of a different mind, he would certainly have found a way to kill us with ease.

  We'd left ourselves wide open to him more times than we knew, as I learned when once he gave me the full tale of our hunt from his side of things, most of which I found to be irksome to hear because he drew such great amusement from it. But annoying or not, there was no denying that he could have picked us off one by one or all at once, such was his power.

  We'd set our quarry on the run, but I came to realize he was never really in much danger from us. As the nights passed in his lonely castle, with me spending a good deal of it in his company listening to his apparently infinite hoard of stories, I soon saw that Van Helsing had severely underestimated our opponent.

  If I did decide to finish the hunt, the task would not be easy.

  * * *

  Dracula wasn't in the library the next night, which was not unusual, for he frequently absented himself without a word. We weren't exactly roped together, so his comings and goings were none of my business, and it was a bit of a relief to be free of his company. I had plenty of distractions, such as taking the opportunity to steal a look at the papers he'd been writing on—only those on top, mind you, anything more would have been truly impolite. As it was he was safe from my curiosity since it was all written in his native tongue of which I had only the bare minimum of words. The stuff looked to be pretty heavy going, too, with many pages of closely written script. The books he had stacked round his writing area were, if I could judge by some of the Latin titles, histories of his country, which bore out his assertion he was writing a memoir of some sort. My curiosity satisfied, I turned my attention to a collection of month-old English, French, and German newspapers that had evidently arrived that day, along with a number of magazines. These items were obviously part of the research he'd done prior to traveling west to England.

  Though out of date, I spent the evening delving into them all. My last weeks in England had been hectic, and I'd not had time to read much of what was happening in the world. Sadly, little had changed when it came to the general kinds of troubles like wars, and I knew that nothing ever would. Having talked so much about the past with my Un-Dead host it was quite clear to me that century after century people kept making the same mistakes, the only variation being in the details. The idea that I would come to see like blunders unfolding again and again over an equally long span of time was both daunting and disheartening.

  Living beyond the usual three score and ten seemed a right good thing at first, a sort of compensation for the inconvenience of only being up and about at night. But after thinking the notion through I realized that along with the sad march of history I'd also be watching friends not yet born age and die. Having spoken of it to my host, his suggestion was simple and practical: stay away from making close attachments to anyone. He'd apparently done so, but I was from a place where a man relies on his friends for his physical and spiritual survival. I wasn't sure I'd be able to harden my heart in the same manner.

  Dracula also assured me I wasn't immortal, so much as ageless, and though extremely tough, I could yet be killed by those who knew how, those like Van Helsing. Certainly under his tutelage I'd learned all kinds of ways of dispatching vampires, which understandably horrified me now. Dracula's admonitions to keep my true nature a secret did not fall on deaf ears, but I wondered whether I'd be able to manage it all the time. My temperament was such as to rankle against isolating myself too much from the company of friends. I was already feeling hemmed in by the remoteness of this gloomy castle, and the more I read of the outside world the more I thought about rejoining it.

  But before that could happen, I'd have to decide what to do about Dracula.

  My instincts told me I still had to study him, and as he wasn't available tonight, my need for action drove me to borrow pen, paper, and a pot of ink from his stock. After two drafts, I was finally satisfied with a letter to be delivered to my London and Paris bankers, which would hopefully head off money troubles for me when I rejoined civilization.

  Knowing that Art would notify them of my premature death, and gambling that he'd not be forthcoming on the details, I informed them that I had, indeed, suffered an accident that separated me from my friends. In good faith Lord Godalming assumed I'd been killed, which would account for any story he would pass on. I told them to treat him kindly, but absolutely not inform him of his mistake, as I planned to do it myself as a happy surprise to him and my other friends. In the meantime, the banks were to take no action regarding my accounts until my return. As proof of my identity, they were welcome to compare the handwriting of my letter to past missives.

  I prepared a similar letter to my Galveston bankers, again instructing them to take no action regarding my will since I still lived. Things would be in an almighty legal mess otherwise. I'd heard tell of a Galveston man who'd been declared dead and had suffered no end of trouble trying to prove himself otherwise so he could get his property back from his relatives. It must have been a bad day for him shouting himself hoarse before a judge trying to convince the court he was indeed alive. His family was no help, for by all accounts he was a bad sort, and they didn't mind him being dead, and in fact preferred it.

  As I had no near kith or kin to worry over, such an alarming turn did not seem a possibility, but I patiently scratched lines on the paper all the same. Better to be safe than sorry, I thought as I folded and addressed them ready for mailing.

  Before I knew it midnight was upon me, so I stretched and determined to take the air. The wind blew strong as it whistled around the shutters and set them to rattling. I wasn't familiar with the manners of the weather in this part of the world, but was willing to wager that a storm was brewing up, and I might not see the outside of the castle for awhile.

/>   I found a long sheepskin coat and a fur cap to throw on as I intended to remain abroad for as long as possible to get some real exercise. A small side door in the courtyard opened onto a snow-choked trail leading down to the woods. The winds eased somewhat with my descent from the heights, but did not entirely depart. As I made the trees it continued to mourn through their tops, shaking pale flakes upon my shoulders. Except for its keening, the silence held complete rule here, and before I'd gone half a mile I felt the utter loneliness of the land closing over me like water on a downing man.

  Shrugging it off as a fancy was useless, for the desolation kept circling back on me, refusing to leave. I thought of what Dracula had said of Harker succumbing to the dark atmosphere of the castle and wondered if it was finally working its way with me. Though alert enough to normal dangers, such subtleties of the spirit are usually lost to my perception. Until a few months ago my feet were planted square on the ground, no ghosts—or vampires—need apply to the world I knew.

  That was the past, though, and this night world was crowded with far more things than I needed or wanted to know about. There wasn't much I could do to fix it back, either. The door had opened wide, and I'd been shoved right through, and like it or not would just have to get used to what I found there.

  I stood for a long time with my back to one of the tall black trunks, listening to the forest. The heaviness in my heart lingered as I remembered other places where I'd taken watch in the late hours. This one reminded me sharply of the rare tough time Art and I had of it in Siberia being tracked by wolves. The pack had been so starved they'd not bothered wasting effort on howling themselves up for a hunt. I'd have preferred their noise, for then we'd have known where they were. Art had looked on the whole business as grim sport, keeping us morbidly cheered with a number of bad jokes mostly to do with welfare of the wolves. He maintained we had to keep moving to spare them from the indigestion they'd suffer should they eat us.